Unit 2: Evernote

The concept

Staying in control of information and resources is a critical element of any workflow. The wealth of information online may seem overwhelming, but fortunately there are some useful digital tools that can help us save and retrieve information for when we need it, and make sure it is available on all of our devices. Evernote is one of the most popular and powerful services for this task.

Evernote is a digital note taking tool, allowing you to create notes with text, links, images, audio and documents. Your entire note library is synchronised online (in the cloud), and it works on all computers and many mobile phones and tablets. It also incorporates some powerful tools for saving web content, so you can clip an entire web page or article to your library and always have access to it. In short, it’s a digital shoebox that can store pretty much anything you want to find later. Watch the introductory video below for an idea of how it works.

Many schools have adopted Evernote as the best organisational tool for both staff and students. Students can have access to all of their work from any computer and can take their work with them into the next year level or even to another school. The sharing options available also means it’s an excellent tool for creating student work folios. (You might like to have a look at the blog of Rob Van Nood, who is documenting his project to use Evernote to create student portfolios. It’s a good one to add to your Google Reader).

Most members of the PLN team use Evernote as a critical part of our workflow. We use it to save useful resources and articles, write ideas for blog posts or course materials, and also use a shared Evernote account to collect all of the resources for the PLN courses. It’s also invaluable for creating some of the step by step tutorials that you will see throughout the course.

As you complete the course, you might find that Evernote becomes the perfect place to save interesting resources that you’d like to come back to later, note down ideas for your own blog reflections and assignments, or keep track of other interesting articles that you find.

The task

Over the next few pages we’re going to look at how to:

sign up for Evernote and login to the web browser version

make new notes and share with others

keep your library organised and find what you need

save web pages for later

Let’s get started by signing up for Evernote. If you don’t have an Evernote account, head over to the Evernote website and select Create an Account. Enter your email address, choose a username and a password and choose Register. You will be sent a confirmation email to the email address you’ve signed up with. Once you receive this email click on the link included to activate your account or enter the code in the email provided.

You can access Evernote in a number of ways. The easiest way to get to know how it works is to access the web version of Evernote, which will work in any browser (Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, Safari etc.).

We have created a number of tutorial videos for you to follow along. All of our tutorial videos will be demonstrating how to use the web browser version of Evernote. You can also install the software on your computer, or install Evernote apps on your phone or tablet. But for now let’s focus on the web version.